


Nightmare in Monochrome

by Arazsya



Series: Of Curses and Firelight [2]
Category: Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2018-09-28 11:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 19,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10099529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Nightmarenoun- a very unpleasant or frightening experience or prospect.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to House of Red Dreaming. The need to read that fic before this one is about 2.5/10 - there are a couple of references to things which happened there, but most of the fic is not all that connected.

It was the strangest of dreams. At first, it was indistinguishable from any other, was even inconspicuous; the laws of gravity were all in place, the colours were the same as when he was awake, the crash of the door being knocked in echoed as all loud sounds should in his apartment.

But that was only how it started, and it did not end

Chandler bolted upright at the noise, his mind shrieking with the shock of it, clinging at the tatters of sleep and the scent of newly-washed sheets in his nose. He struggled in the vague direction of standing, his limbs tangling in the duvet as the air fractured with the sounds of the intruders’ shouting. There was too much of it, all at once, for him to pick out words.

He had only just made it to his feet when light struck at his widened eyes with the force of a sledgehammer. A reeling backwards step dragged at him, and he overbalanced, his brain too clouded with spinning to stop it, but a hand grabbed at his arm before he could fall.

More shouting, shuddering in Chandler’s head, but when he tried to bring up his free hand to rub at his temples, he found that whoever it was had caught that one, too. He squinted, trying to force resolution from a world of stubborn blurs, while the light pulsed behind his retinas and throbbed pain into his skull.

“Joseph Chandler, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder,” his captor informed him, and with the words came the utter clarity that he had been seeking, though he found himself wishing it away, trying to swallow it when it clogged his throat with nausea. Something curled around his wrists, cold to the bone. “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” There was a pause, and the speaker’s voice twisted over the next question, as if it had been dragged from a throat laid open to the spine. “Do you understand?”

Chandler didn’t. He didn’t understand, not any of it. The words all made perfect sense, as did the sentence that they had been strung into. He had uttered the whole caution enough fruitless times himself to know it backwards. It was its placement that set him staring, because it didn’t belong here, in his home; this wasn’t its context. It wasn’t supposed to be said to _him_.

He did manage to speak, though, even if his voice was more perplexed, more shaken, than he had heard it in a long time.

“ _Miles_?”

Miles seemed to take that as all of the understanding required.

“I’ve got him!” he yelled, the noise of it stabbing into Chandler’s brain. But, with the uncompromising, contorted expression on his sergeant’s face, he knew better than to mention his discomfort.

Mansell materialised in the doorway, his teeth showing and the whites of his eyes shot through with red. Chandler looked behind him, searching for the others, for Riley’s sensible presence, for Kent’s tentative smile, but they weren’t there. Just the black-and-white blurs of a couple of uniforms.

“Stay here,” Miles ordered, and Mansell gave the tightest of nods in reply, as if he didn’t trust himself with speaking. “Keep searching. Take the place apart if you have to.”

Chandler’s protest died in a single puff of air as both the uniforms raised their heads, turning to glare in his direction with all the slow synchronisation of a pair of snarl-faced cats. Miles jerked on his arms, his hold tight enough that Chandler could feel exactly the shape of the bruises it would leave, and they started moving.

Out in the night, the air was more frozen than the cuffs over Chandler’s wrists, and it shocked the memory of the first few words of Miles’ caution back into his head.

“Wait,” he said, though he had already been half-propelled into the back seat of the waiting police car, the old scent of fast food setting his gut roiling. “Miles, what’s–”

The door slammed over his words, and the uniforms settled on either side of him, closed, unfriendly, and effectively blocking out any chance at conversation with Miles. He opened his mouth, prepared to try again anyway, sure that he was owed some sort of explanation, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way the sergeant paused before he turned the engine on, or the violence with which he struck at the gearstick, hands white around the knuckle. Maybe he felt the crackle of fury in the air between them as Miles glanced backward, checking if it was safe to reverse, without looking at him.

As they started off down a route that was more familiar to Chandler than the layout of his own home, he settled back to stare out of the window with the blank-eyed fascination of the exhausted. It was then, watching the streetlamps blazing in the glass, that he decided that it had to be a dream. The light, he convinced himself, had that sort of bright-dim quality to it. The situation itself should have been enough of an indication; there had never been a scene so ludicrous, and not even Doctor Seuss could have written one.

Soon, though, he would wake up. He would contemplate mentioning the dream to Miles, and laugh himself silent at the very idea. Then he would get on with his day. With the _case_. The memory of it, of the victims’ dead faces, could have shocked him back to consciousness, from a lighter sleep. Dumped before anyone had realised that they were missing. Strangled. Still staring.

Chandler remembered going down to the Archive, asking Buchan for precedents. The bundle of files that the historian had deposited onto his desk had been large enough that Chandler’s eyes had stung with the dust it displaced.

The car pulled in at the station, a hand on Chandler’s arm pulling him from both his thoughts and the vehicle. He blinked himself back toward the real world, for a moment convinced that he would wake up, but instead of the morning light stretching across his apartment, he saw Buchan. The historian was standing beside the entrance, as if he had been there for hours and the rest of the world had learned to go on without him, his expression curiously blank. He didn’t shiver, despite his lack of a coat.

“Get out of here!” Miles snapped at him, barging one of the PCs out of the way and taking hold of Chandler again. Buchan swallowed, and vanished back inside. Miles hauled Chandler after him, and as they pushed through the doors, he found his voice again.

“Miles, what’s going on?” he demanded, but his only answer was a more violent yank in the direction of the cells.

_It’s just a dream_ , he reminded himself, though anxiety had started to buzz around the edges of his vision, muttering that maybe it wasn’t. _Just a dream_. All he had to do was wait, and he would wake up. Maybe he wouldn’t even remember it.

There was only the slightest of pauses on the way past the custody officer’s desk. Chandler had no pockets to empty, and Miles didn’t bother with the formality of asking him. He signed something, he knew – that was procedure, after all, and his hand was left with the ghost of the pen’s shape. But it might as well have been a takeaway menu, for all that he remembered of the words. That was all right, though, his mind reassured him. After all, people couldn’t read in dreams anyway.

Riley was waiting beside the open cell door, leaning on the wall, though she straightened as soon as she saw him, as much menace in the movement as in the slow shift of a wolf noticing its prey. This wasn’t the person he’d been looking for behind Mansell. There was too much threat in her for that.

“It’s all right,” Miles told her, and the harshness in his voice cracked, just for a moment. He sounded almost gentler than Chandler had ever heard him. “I’ll do it.”

She whisked away without a word, and Chandler’s gaze was too caught by the open cell to glance after her. It was the same one that they had shut Fitzgerald in, he recalled, all darkness and closely-clustered bricks.

The moment that he stepped inside and inhaled the first lungful of frigid air, he realised that he wasn’t about to wake up. He wasn’t going to wake up thirty minutes from now, and unless he somehow managed to get to sleep on a slab of padding too narrow to accommodate one of Miles’ kids, let alone him, he wasn’t going to wake up six hours from now. The bone-chill cold of that room was impossible in dreams.

He turned, but Miles was already reaching for the door, ready to close it, the chalk to write Chandler’s name on the board clutched in one blanched hand, hard enough that he looked as if he were about to snap it.

“Miles, wait,” he called, but the sergeant – not Miles anymore, nowhere close – didn’t even slow. The whole time, he stared almost as he had done when Chandler had first arrived at the department. Shades worse. It hurt more deeply, even to Chandler’s confused mind, caught halfway between fight and flight and throttled with the unthought understanding that he couldn’t do either.

“ _Miles_!” he repeated, more desperately, as his wide sweep of light from the hallway began to narrow toward the merest chink. “Please, at least tell me who it is that I’m supposed to have murdered!”

The sergeant stopped. He didn’t open the door any wider, only half of his expression visible, though that was enough for Chandler to quail back from the angry contortion of features, confusion and fear scouring any last traces of confidence from his head.

Miles flung the words out into Chandler’s face, an accusation.

“Detective Constable Emerson Kent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I intend to upload the next chapter up next Saturday, or thereabouts. I hope you enjoyed reading, and thanks in advance to anyone who leaves comments or kudos!
> 
> If you want to throw things, tell me about your dog (I would love to hear about any dogs you may have), or just say hi, I can also be found here at [my tumblr](http://yszarin.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

Refusal turned his mind blank. His hands came up to claw at his head, in a desperate attempt to unhear the name. But it had already made it too deep into his head, its meaning indelible against his bones. It was too late, the world was changed, and there was no way back to before.

Chandler went down slowly, his fingernails digging at his face, trying to drag the static from beneath the skin. His whole body sagged, collapsing in on itself, his hands sliding up into his hair. _No_ , he decided, but it was nothing but a shout into the black. Did nothing to fill the sudden emptiness beneath his ribs. Where he had never quite realised that there had been form, until there was void.

He wanted to call Miles back. Wanted to make his sergeant tell him that he had misheard, but he had pins and needles, marrow-deep. His limbs wouldn't move. He couldn’t remember how to make them. The world would turn past him, and he would remain, a folded man, until time released its hold.

Besides, he hadn’t been mistaken. Miles’ voice had been too clear for that, the syllables too savage. The name was spoken. Done. He had heard what he had heard. It just didn’t feel _possible_. Not when he had last seen Kent earlier that night, on the other side of a door that was now closed and locked. He had come to Chandler’s office, to let him know that he was heading home. Chandler had looked up, and he’d said something. He couldn’t recall what. He remembered everything else, though, he thought – Kent had knocked twice, had been wearing a purple shirt, and when he had smiled in response to whatever Chandler had said, it had crept further up one side of his face than the other.

And now, suddenly, absence.

He couldn’t fathom it. It was something great and Lovecraftian, only ever glimpsed in the periphery of understanding.

It still escaped him when they came to get him in the morning. They thrust something halfway between shoes and slippers at him, bundled up in a sweatshirt. Chandler didn’t feel any warmer with the clothes on, barely noticed the distance between the cells and the interview room. Didn’t realise that he had moved, until the world swayed disorientingly into focus, and he was sitting across from Miles and Mansell, the tape recorder set between them like the glass at a bank.

They were a little fuzzed around the edges. Outlines drifting, like a water-rippled reflection. Before, perhaps, he could have accepted that as just another function of the nightmare, but he knew that it was just his eyes, gone half-mad from staring into the nothing where Kent should have been.

Mansell slid a photo across to him, its path juddered by the shake of his fingers and the sharp angles that his knuckles had bent into. He said nothing, but his eyes were on Chandler, unblinking, and they told him enough of what was in the DC’s head.

Chandler looked down at the picture, and it swallowed him.

Sharp angry lines, stark in the slap of the flash-bulb from the SOCOs’ camera. Tiles, the borders between them bleached almost into nothing, though not even the bright light could hide the blood. It had pooled, almost black at its centre.

He stared, waiting for his eyes to see something different. Something new, something that could help. Anything other than what he saw, and the implications of it. But the red wouldn’t go. The red would never go.

“We know it’s his,” Miles said, his voice flat. “Llewellyn tested it.”

Mansell took another photo from his file and placed it, crooked-edged, in front of Chandler. He frowned, recognising the same tiles as were in the other picture, though these were against the edge of a worktop, perhaps. The subject seemed to be a coil of dull yellow material, flecked with blood.

“That,” Miles went on, “is the tie you were wearing yesterday. I recognised it. Maybe he tore it off you when you attacked him. We also found your fingerprints at the crime scene.” He paused for a moment, but there was no hesitation in it when he spoke again. “I didn’t want to believe it. None of us did. But then, when we searched your apartment, we found the rest of the clothes you were wearing in your bin. The weapon. We know that you did it.”

“I didn’t even know where he lived,” Chandler found himself protesting, but he sounded underwater-distant even to himself, and they ignored him.

“We’re sure you had an excellent reason,” Miles ground out, making sure that he felt every hating sound of it. The sergeant sat back, almost as if he were relaxed, but Chandler could see the tension, knew that he was keeping himself distant, like the dog on the other side of the fence that knew it could only bark. “But we’ll talk about that later. What we want to know, right now, is where the body is.”

“You haven’t found him?” Chandler’s voice had the cadence of an echo, and he blinked, finding his eyes dragged back to the first photo, to the point that he couldn’t raise his head and discern the truth from Miles’ face. The image drew his soul, the contrasts of the colours, red and white and white and red, hypnotic. It probably made him look all the guiltier, unable to glance away from his crime.

“No,” Mansell said, and he spoke so quietly that it was barely audible, though there was enough of growling in it that Chandler’s neck prickled. “We haven’t. But we’d like to. Erica, his sister, she’d like to bury him. We all would. Don’t you think he deserves that?”

“I can’t help you,” Chandler murmured, leaning back in his chair in an attempt to disengage, from the conversation, from all of it. It didn’t work, could never have worked, because the photo was stuck in his head, and he could almost hear the whine of the camera from it, suddenly unfamiliar. “I don’t know where he is.”

Miles’ face twitched, and he shifted, digging about in a pocket. He placed a familiar jar on the table, the dull click of the impact snatching Chandler’s attention. The smell of it poked at his nose, and he reached for it, the gesture almost automatic. The sergeant slid it away, and this time, there was no flicker in his expression.

“You probably want this, don’t you?” he prompted, scraping the Tiger Balm back and forth across the surface, just out of reach. “I certainly don’t. Tell me where he is, and you can have it.”

Chandler slumped back, his limbs loosening. He couldn’t meet Miles’ stare, his skull far too heavy to lift again. His eyes tried to skate back to the photo. “It wouldn’t help,” he managed, his words dropping straight from his mouth to the tabletop.

“You’re right, it wouldn’t,” Mansell snarled, his precarious control gone for the barest of moments, and Chandler could _almost_ hear the words that were about to come. They had colours in his mind, spun and snapped like fireworks. But Miles touched Mansell’s arm, briefly, and extinguished the touchpaper again. The silence came back, and Chandler scrubbed his hands over his eyes, letting himself see stars. It should have hurt, should have at least been uncomfortable, but it didn’t feel like anything beyond the numb buzzing in his limbs which wouldn’t go away.

“I can’t help you,” he told them again, more quietly, the words mumbled past his fingers. “I don’t know where he is. I didn’t hurt him. I wouldn’t–”

Miles snorted, reaching over to strike at the photos with one finger, in what had probably only been intended as a tap. “Other than this,” he said, glowering at the tie, at the blood. “There were no signs of a struggle. Nothing. We know Kent let the man who killed him into his home. He trusted you.”

“You knew that his housemates were out for the night,” Mansell added, though his eyes, too wide around the pupils and not enough blinking, told Chandler that he’d rather be going about the interrogation another way. “Riley asked him yesterday morning if he had plans, while you were at the whiteboard.”

Chandler remembered the conversation, he supposed. He hadn’t been listening, though, hadn’t picked out many words. He’d been thinking about the case, and their voices had just been a distantly comforting buzz of normality in the background. An old memory of a hearth.

“They got in in the early hours of the morning,” Miles went on. “Sobered up rather quickly when they found this. They called the police, and then me specifically. They were hoping–” he paused, mouth twisting around the words, as though he were choking up something jagged. “They were hoping that we would be able to find him. They thought he’d still be alive. And we hoped, too, but that–” he stabbed viciously at the first picture again, “is more than a person can lose and survive it. Llewellyn told us.”

Chandler flinched. He wondered if the others had, too, when they had found out, how Llewellyn had phrased it, how long it had taken them to understand it, and his mind snatched at the scene that he hadn’t been to, holding tightly enough that he didn’t realise that he had been about to speak until the volume of his own voice jolted him back into the room.

“I told you,” he snapped. “I didn’t hurt him. I wouldn’t hurt him. The last time I saw Kent, he was leaving work yesterday evening. I told him–” The spark in his words stuttered suddenly out, and the next ones came halting and hushed. “I told him I’d see him tomorrow.”

He swallowed, for a moment expecting Miles and Mansell to interject, but they were looking at one another, a conversation that he was no longer a part of, couldn’t quite understand.

“I’ll tell you this as many times as I need to,” he said, no longer able to raise his voice. “I didn’t do this. I don’t know who did. I don’t know where he is. And every second that you spend with me is time you’re wasting.”

“We have your fingerprints,” Mansell reminded him, gesturing at the photos with a one-handed sweep that tried too hard to be short of a blow, “at the crime scene. Your tie. How could they have got there if you didn’t even know where he lived?”

“I don’t know,” Chandler muttered, slipping backwards again, an itch making itself known at the back of his skull. “It doesn’t matter.” He turned tired eyes toward Miles, a flicker of hurt in his expression. “Why don’t you believe me? Why don’t you trust me? We’ve worked together for years, Miles. Doesn’t any of that mean anything?”

Miles shrugged, but the gesture was too considered, too forced, for nonchalance, his eyes too fixed on Chandler’s. “It meant something to me,” he said. “But now Kent’s dead, there’s evidence of _you_ all over the crime scene and the crime scene all over _your_ apartment, there’s a man matching _your_ description on the CCTV, and the knife under _your_ floorboards. _You_ killed _Kent_ , then you went home and had a lovely peaceful sleep, and I only want to have to see you again when you’re found guilty at your trial.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and especially for those who've left comments or kudos! Next chapter should be up next weekend sometime. I think it might be a bit less angsty? A bit? Maybe?


	3. Chapter 3

They took him back to his cell not long after that. There hadn’t really been anything more to say. Their conversation had just kept circling, around and around, Chandler unable to marshal his stuttering thoughts into arguments or questions that he could use to pry himself free.

Perhaps Miles thought he needed a little more time to soften up. If he did, he was wrong; Chandler was fairly certain that he was about as soft as he was going to get. Soft, and still bewildered, the unfamiliar expressions on his old team’s faces raw against the place where Kent had been ripped away. He couldn’t think, head too full of flashes. Images of Kent. Waiting for him to tell him he’d done good work. Arguing with him over Morgan. Telling him not to give up hope.

All gone now.

Chandler swallowed and shook his head, his expression that of a man in prayer, his eyes sliding closed. He forced them open again, because then he could see something, feel something, other than the thicket which was tangling inside his skull. If he reached too far into it, thought too long on its negative space, his hands would catch on the thorns, and he would never be free.

Maybe it would do him good, to have the time and the solitude to work himself out, to work everything out, rationally. He sat on the edge of the pallet and tried to recall the crime scene photos, without thinking about whose blood was in them. Tried to treat the case like any other. Means, motive, opportunity. One at a time. Imagine a whiteboard.

But then he noticed the pressure of his palm on his face, scrubbing down over his cheekbone, then up again towards his hairline, as if he could have read something in the lines over his forehead, the movement barely conscious.

Even if he had had all the information which he needed, he couldn’t detach himself. Not when it was his fingerprints all over the scene, and not when he couldn’t think through three consecutive sentences without being dragged back into the empty spaces where his youngest DC should have been.

He tried to think about the case before instead, about all those poor young women and the bruises on their throats, but his skull felt full of molasses.

So he just sat in silence, and let the cold cool his skin.

When the door unlocked again, it was as if it woke him into an empty head. He turned his attention toward the crunch of the keys, and blinked at the light from the hallway until it was near-gone again.

What had entered his cell was far too much cardigan to be a policeman.

“Ed,” he said, half-standing, and then having to abort the motion as the historian took a step back. At least sitting down again gave him time to swallow the thin, desperate insistence that he was nothing to be afraid of, which had started to well up in his throat. “How long have we been letting you visit the cells?”

Buchan shrugged, and then made his way a few centimetres closer. His movements were all so separated from one another, as if he were planning them all out beforehand like one of his books, that he had to come to a complete stop before he responded.

“It’s something of a special occasion, I suppose.”

He was trying to show the same detached kind of rage as the others, but it wasn’t quite there. Because his heart wasn’t in it, Chandler hoped. Hoped that he still had at least one friend left. At the very least, someone who was as bewildered by it all as he was.

“They’ve sent you in to try and find out where Kent’s body is,” Chandler said, offering a forced smile that felt like it was expressed through one of Oliver Diggory’s skin masks. It might as well have been, the way Buchan twitched away from it.

“It would be nice to know,” Buchan said, after a long pause, his eyes flickering between Chandler and the door and back again, as though he had been told not to look away from the murderer, but kept forgetting to.

Chandler wished, so hard that something in his chest felt strained, that he could find a way to reassure him. To show Buchan that he was still his friend. But it seemed like the historian had been told all about what Miles thought had happened to Kent. Probably right down to an explanation of the blood spatter patterns, to get him this skittish.

“Yes,” he agreed, his fingers twitching for Tiger Balm that he didn’t have, despite what he had told Miles in interrogation, because for a moment, he needed it. And maybe it would have helped Buchan, to see such a familiar gesture. Maybe it wouldn’t have, maybe it would have made everything worse, trying to reconcile those two realities. “It would. But I don’t know where it is. I didn’t kill him.”

Buchan’s face turned even more downcast, as if he had thought that Chandler would have something to offer, that he could have wrested it away from him if he had. He took a tiny step further into the cell, which seemed to bring him as close as he could bear to be to Chandler, his jaw working.

“Why wasn’t I called?” Chandler asked, before Buchan could find a new way of phrasing a question that he had already heard too many times. Quietly, because he wasn’t a threat. Shouldn’t speak like one. “Do you know?”

Buchan wouldn’t meet his eyes. Not the way that Miles and Mansell and Riley had, and Chandler told himself that that was because the historian lacked their confidence in the team’s convictions. Or perhaps he was just seeing what he wanted to see, and Buchan just couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead, he just stared at a point in the masonry somewhere to the left of Chandler’s cheek.

“I understand that they tried,” he said. “I heard DS Miles tried as soon as DC Kent’s housemates called him, on his way to the scene. And you didn’t answer. I’m told he got quite worried, thought that perhaps you had been attacked, too, but then he found your tie. Maybe you didn’t hear your phone. It was late, after all, and you had been working all day. And killing a friend must be rather exhausting.”

“I didn’t do this, Ed,” Chandler said, and it felt as if he would never stop saying it. That that same sentence would be winding itself off his lips like the tune from a music box right up until the day he died. “Kent was a friend. What possible motive could I have had?”

Buchan gathered himself with a gesture not unlike the shuffling of papers, though he was empty-handed. Perhaps it was just an automatic movement, or perhaps he wanted the barrier that a sheaf of files would provide, something which he could hide behind.

“In 1995,” he began, his voice gaining strength, its tempo and inflection shifting towards his storyteller mode. “In New Orleans–”

“We’re not in New Orleans,” Chandler said, cutting him off, though there was no bite in it. He didn’t want to bite. Wouldn’t have had the strength for it even if he had. All the indignant rage that he could have had, had the victim been some stranger, had been sapped. “This isn’t 1995. I know you have precedents. You always do. But I’m asking you, in the here and now, if you really believe that I killed Kent.”

Buchan took a moment before he answered, a swallow bobbing in his throat. “It doesn’t matter what I believe, Joe. It matters what can be proven.”

_It matters to me_ , Chandler wanted to say, but it seemed like he wasn’t going to get a real answer to that question. Perhaps the historian didn’t want to alienate himself from either of the groups he was stuck between. Maybe he had just been told to keep being Chandler’s friend, because that was something that Miles thought he could use. The uncertainty of it was sour down to Chandler’s marrow.

“Then let me help you disprove it,” he said, as something in his mind sputtered to life, the sparks of it arcing through his head, showering clarity into his thoughts. “Tell me what time it happened.”

For a long beat of silence, it seemed as though Buchan wasn’t going to answer, his eyes unfocussing slightly, hazing over.

“We last... we last see DC Kent on local CCTV at eight seventeen pm,” he managed finally, pausing to swallow around a voice that was cracking, the noise of it leaving an answering ache in Chandler’s throat. “He opens the door to someone. Your height, blond hair, suit, although the quality isn’t good enough for us to make out facial features. He lets him in. The man removes–” he stopped again, to clear his throat, and then continued. “Removes the body at nine twenty-three.”

Chandler wondered for a moment if they had made Buchan watch it. His head wasn’t in the cell, that much he could tell from the staring sheen which had settled over the blue eyes, and from the fingers which twitched nervously at something that wasn’t there. Kent had picked at his hands when he was nervous, Chandler remembered, and held a blink for a moment longer than he had needed to.

“At seven forty-five, I left my home,” he said, leaning forward to engage, and Buchan’s focus snapped back to him, something angry coiling behind the features. It wasn’t the indignation that he recalled from that first case, the bustling to make a complaint. It wasn’t quite like anything he’d seen from the historian before, and he flinched back like a scolded child, his veins firing with the idea that he’d been wrong to hope that Buchan was on his side, his psyche teetering on the edge of that almost-snarl. 

“And you got back at nine forty-four,” the historian growled. “We know. You had plenty of time.”

“I went _shopping_ ,” Chandler insisted, and he could hear the slightest of pleading whines in his voice. “I was out of milk.” There had been something else, something that had warranted a trip to a supermarket, but he couldn’t remember it. It had been the milk that had meant he’d needed to go out when he did, anyway. He’d been so sure there had been a full pint when he’d left that morning. “I didn’t go to Kent’s house, and I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know his address. You can probably check, I’ll be on CCTV, probably, there were cameras, it was the Waitrose off–”

“Joe,” Buchan interrupted, and he didn’t seem angry anymore. Just sad and aching and numb. Chandler supposed that he knew that well enough, too. “I just want to know–”

“Are they not interested in proving my innocence?” Chandler asked, and he could feel the hurt on his face, even if it hadn’t made it so very deep into his chest, not like the photo. “Because they’ve got their fingerprint evidence, their murder weapon, they’re not interested in my alibi? The evidence is wrong, Ed. Wrong. And if any of you, _any of you_ , actually wanted to catch the person who killed him, lock them up, then you would be making sure the case against whomever you arrested was watertight, you would be going by the book, and you would be _listening to me_. Any self-respecting lawyer could get this thrown out of court in seconds. If this goes on much longer, I’ll be calling one.” Not that the prospect of a lawyer had occurred to him before that moment. Even then, it felt oddly like a betrayal. “But the more time you waste on me, the harder it’ll be to catch the real killer, and that’s all that matters to me. That we get justice for Kent. So just check, will you?”

Buchan had been backing away while Chandler had been speaking, though he had been doing his best to keep his tone level. But there was barely any force in the motion when the historian knocked on the door to be let out, and when he finally met Chandler’s eyes, the lines around his own just looked tired.

“That’s what matters to all of us, Joe,” he said, and Chandler couldn’t tell if he’d managed to convince him or not. There was nothing in his voice to speak of a decision made, or of anything beyond what he was actually saying. “I suppose I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Ed,” Chandler said, standing and stretching out a hand toward Buchan, even as the historian turned back into the corridor, the light that he wasn’t allowed into, stepping past the shoulder of someone in a suit. “Please–”

His words fell on a slammed door, and then he was alone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not less angsty, as it turns out? I was sure I remembered them getting less angsty? Never mind. As ever, thank you so much for reading, and bonus points for leaving kudos or comments. Next chapter should be up next weekend, when we will finally get a POV other than Chandler's.


	4. Chapter 4

The doubt felt like mould. Creeping through the inside of Buchan's head, all that he could think about no matter how he occupied himself. He had tried sorting new folders into the Archive, filed and refiled things under different headings, and it had only spread. Niggling. Something that he could always see out of the corner of his eye, until he was blind to everything else.

Eventually, he gave in. Sat at his desk with his head in his hands, his fingers bars over his eyes. Not being able to see anything at all didn’t help. He didn’t know what would; he needed to talk to someone, he recognised, but his therapist was gone, and the only person that he had felt comfortable speaking to before, about the mould, about everything, was too distant to go to again. Between them were metres of concrete and miles further in a frost that he couldn’t thaw.

All that he could do was sit in the basement and stew in his thoughts. In his _doubts_. Wish that there was some sort of mental bleach that he could use to sear them away. He’d been so convinced before, after everything had happened. Even as far as the first few minutes in the cell he’d been wondering in wild moments, as if he were a horse about to bolt, who else Chandler would have killed, if any of them had ever really known him, how long it had taken for Kent to fight back.

He told himself that DS Miles knew what he was doing, had been doing it for years, that he wouldn’t have arrested his DI if there was any chance, even just the slightest glimmer of hope, that Chandler was innocent. But he found the cracks in that argument, too, just as he had found the scars which the cleaners had left in the Archive’s walls, when the mould had proven resistant to whatever chemical they had doused it in and they had torn at it instead. He wondered how many times, his fingers itching to count through them so that he could feel their weight, he had overheard Miles swear that he had a nose for these things, that the person they had arrested was absolutely the culprit, he could feel it in his bones.

He hadn’t been right about that for as long as Buchan had been working there. Hadn’t been right even before that, during the Ripper case, when he had been so sure about Buchan himself.

History had simply never supported the veracity of his conclusions. There was no reason why it should be any different now. He could go through every scrap of paper in the room, right back until it turned fragile and yellow, and all of them would tell him the same thing; the past repeated itself, and they had to learn from it.

That was the whole point of his job.

And it was more than that, he admitted. Chandler was right; Buchan couldn’t come up with a motive. He tried to, scribbled down an ugly little list of possibilities, his pen scoring deep enough into his post-it note that he knew he’d be able to read his suggestions off the desk underneath.

The handwriting didn’t look like his, and the options didn’t look like Chandler’s. Maybe there had been some other reason, some argument that they had had that Buchan hadn’t been privy to, but beyond that, the best that he could think of was that his friend had just snapped. After all, he heard the whispers from the uniforms in the corridors, even if he had never put much stock in them. Every now and again, he’d caught the tail end of a concerned glance from one of the team. He’d known that Chandler wasn’t all right. But the man hadn’t been bad enough to look up someone’s address, drive to their house and kill them. Nowhere close, the last time that Buchan had seen him. It had been so much easier to think that he had been when there had been nothing in his head beyond the understanding that DC Kent was gone.

_Evidence_ , Buchan reminded himself, but the hand holding the pen wouldn’t write it. It wasn’t a strong enough word anymore. Not when he weighed it against the desperation he had read in Chandler’s face, the real, absolute grief that had been audible in his voice. And then, ruling out that the attack had been a momentary whim, if it had been premeditated, Chandler wouldn’t have been fool enough to leave his fingerprints all over the crime scene. He’d have removed all traces of himself along with the body, would never have left his tie there, would have disposed of everything properly.

No, if Chandler had been the killer, then they would never have had cause to suspect him.

But Miles believed it. And the DI had had no greater supporter, excepting possibly poor Kent.

Buchan choked on a noise that was too close to a sob, and glared balefully into the files on the desk as he waited for his throat to clear again. Black and white, newsprint and photograph, stared back at him, impassive.

He wished that he had never gone into that cell. That he could have kept the certainty that he had found on Miles’ face a little longer. It would always have decayed eventually, he supposed, but perhaps it would have for the others, too, and then he wouldn’t have been so alone in it. He could have stayed upstairs with Riley and Mansell and Miles, four instead of six and snarling at the spaces.

But Miles, the only authority they had left and all teeth, had said that he was the only one who could do it. That Chandler wouldn’t see him as an official presence, wouldn’t feel so betrayed by him, might talk to him when he hadn’t in his interrogation. That Kent deserved their trying everything they could. That he’d be perfectly safe because Miles would be right outside. That there was no real danger.

Except there had been. _I didn’t do this_ , Chandler had said, and god help him, Buchan believed him. Believed the despairing in the words, the way the man’s voice had rasped when he’d said Kent’s name. And it was what he wanted to believe, the strangling in his chest a little looser when he felt his mind tip towards it. It mattered to him that he would get to keep a friend, that the last thing that DC Kent had seen, as his blood had stained those tiles, hadn’t been Joseph Chandler holding a knife.

The side of Buchan’s mouth twitched in something that wasn’t quite a grimace, because he was suddenly more Cassandra than Atlas. No matter what he believed, he wasn’t going to be able to convince anyone else that Chandler was innocent. Riley wouldn’t talk to him. Mansell was Mansell. Miles wouldn’t give him the time of day, after he’d failed to get an answer from their suspect.

It would be different if he had proof, though, he realised, the pen sliding from his fingers, no longer important. He could always go to Waitrose himself, check on Chandler’s alibi. For a moment, his spine straightened towards something akin to resolution, but then the crowding voices of his doubts snuffed him back into a slump.

He didn’t have a warrant card. Didn’t have the standing to ask for the CCTV, and Miles wasn’t likely to accept anything other than timestamped footage. It was possible that he’d used the self-service checkouts, or that no one would remember him even if he hadn’t.

But if he didn’t do anything, then the man who had killed Kent might slip away into the dark forever, just as the Ripper had.

Buchan set his jaw, and gripped the edge of his desk, trying to force himself to stand. To go up to the incident room, to talk to Riley. To explain to her what Chandler had said, beg her to check on it. But the idea of her expression, a tightly polite smile that showed him all of the difficulty behind it, set a tremor in his legs that wouldn’t let him move.

“This is more important than that,” he told himself, but there was no response from his traitorous limbs.

“What’s more important?”

Buchan started with a violence that nearly upturned his desk, papers skidding into the air as he scrambled around.

It was only Mansell, almost-leaning against a shelf, his shape out of place, unfamiliar among the books and files.

“DC Mansell,” Buchan said, straightening his cardigan in an attempt at recovery. The wool caught against one of his fingernails. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really,” Mansell said, shifting on his feet, discomfort darting his eyes sideways. “I just. After the skipper and I interrogated the bo–the suspect. I know it can get difficult. I thought I’d come and make sure you were all right. Are you?”

Buchan offered something that he hoped was a smile.

“Not really,” he replied, and Mansell winced, as if he had wanted Buchan to lie to him. “There’s been something bothering me. But I think you’ll be able to help, put my mind at ease.”

Mansell’s eyes narrowed, their colour still close enough to that of his skin that the effect unsettled Buchan’s stomach.

“Depends what it is,” he said.

Buchan held his breath for a second, wondering if he should just swallow it all back down again, wait for Chandler to hire a lawyer to get him out instead. But the time that that would take could make all the difference, their chances of catching the real killer trickling away.

“It’s just something DI Chandler said,” he managed, placing too much stress on the title, the surname. Trying to be professional. To prove that he wasn’t too close. That he wasn’t talking about his friend Joe, and couldn’t be dismissed as such. “He told me that he was shopping at the time of the... the murder. He said he was at Waitrose. I thought that maybe someone could go there, show his picture around, check the CCTV, just to make sure.”

Mansell’s face smoothed out again, but it wasn’t towards a relaxed expression. It was more as if he had had to pinpoint every emotion that had been showing there, and consciously force them away, one by one.

“He got in your head, didn’t he?”

He had. Buchan swallowed, scraped the back of one hand along the bottom of an eye socket. The force felt bruising, but he knew he wouldn’t find any marks there later.

“What harm can it do?” he asked, his voice hushed enough that Mansell had to take a step closer to hear him properly. “If he killed Kent, he wasn’t there, and no one will remember him. He won’t be on the CCTV. But if he was, then we’ve got the wrong man. Don’t you think it’s worth making sure? For DC Kent’s sake.”

Mansell twitched, as if he were about to explode, just as his skipper would have done, snapping and growling. But when he spoke, his voice was low and considered.

“Don’t try to say that I’m not trying to do right by Kent,” he said. “Remember, I’m the one who told his sister. So, I’ll go, I’ll ask. We need this case to be as strong as possible. But _you_ need to remember that he stopped being our boss the moment that he became a suspect. He stopped being our friend. And you’re going to have to accept that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, hope you enjoyed reading some further angst! Also, thank you so much to everyone who's been leaving comments and kudos, you've been so lovely and it really does mean a lot. Next chapter should be up sometime next weekend, but there is a lengthy train journey home occurring that sort of time too, so it might be a little bit late.


	5. Chapter 5

Mansell didn’t think that he’d ever been quite so glad to see a Waitrose. They’d never really been his thing, as he was sure would surprise exactly no people who knew him; as far as he was concerned, the food tasted just the same as it would’ve from Tesco, it just had more syllables in the name. But anything, even wan supermarket lighting and tired cashiers, was better than the dull silence in that car. He’d tried to banish it every way he could think of, but he hadn’t been able to settle on a radio station, and his humming had fallen flat almost before it had left his throat. So the quiet had sat, heavy in the passenger seat, immovable.

He slammed the door on it as hard as he could, but he knew that it would still be there when he got back. That something as simple as violence or noise couldn’t dispel it. He locked the car behind him, and his fingers scrabbled his phone from his pocket in exchange for the keys.

There weren’t any texts. No missed calls. The only thing that had the light flashing blue was a notification from a gaming app that he’d downloaded months ago to pass the time and not got around to deleting.

He supposed that he hadn’t really been expecting anything. Hoped, perhaps. For something from Erica. To let him know that she was all right. Even if it would have been a lie, a cheery smiley sitting rictus after it. Something to let him know that she might cope, might survive.

But he understood if she didn’t want to talk to him right now. Maybe she’d considered it, had brought up his contact icon on her phone, a ridiculous photo she’d taken of him when he’d fallen asleep on her sofa, and all she had seen when she had looked at it was her dead brother’s colleague. Maybe she, in some secluded corner of her subconscious, held him responsible. He was the one who’d delivered the news, after all.

He wouldn’t have had anyone else tell her. The skipper had offered, but Mansell had refused. It had felt important that she hear it from him. Even though he hadn’t quite known how to say it, in the end. _We regret to inform you_ had been too official, too professional, and it wasn’t something that Mansell had known how to be professional about.

She had known what was wrong, though. He had tried to stutter through words that he couldn’t quite remember, and her face had turned stricken.

“Tell me,” she had said, and he had. He had told her everything from the moment that the skipper had recognised Kent’s address, and throughout it all, she sat too still. So still that he had been able to see all the frantic shifting beneath the skin, as she struggled to realign her world.

She had asked, in a voice that was far too level, if they were certain that no one could lose that much blood and live, and he had had to tell her that they were. She had asked if they were sure it was Kent’s, and he had had to tell her that they were. She had asked if they were certain that Chandler had done it, and he had had to tell her that they were. It had felt like stripping her skin away with a knife, one answer at a time. That was when she had started to cry, the first tear rising in her eye and then spilling away from her blink, leaving a trail down her cheek like a snail’s track in the morning.

Only now, they weren’t so sure, were they? It wasn’t something that Mansell would admit, especially not to Buchan, but Chandler had got into his head, too. Not in interrogation. Not seeing him through Buchan’s eyes. Not even watching his desperate protests as Miles had taken him into custody. No, Chandler had got into his head years ago, when he’d been laughing at stories in the canteen from the rest of the team, about ties and bins. Then with a tie of his own, on the Kray investigation, in every one of the cases after, as surely as tying that half-Windsor had become muscle memory. That was why it had hurt so much.

He’d never thought Chandler capable of murder, but he’d been happy enough to forget that, happy enough to hate and to believe the evidence, until Buchan had snuck that doubt into his brain. The dots didn’t seem to connect anymore, an image of Chandler with his head in his hands after losing yet another murderer stuck between each one of them.

He didn’t know how Erica would react to that. But not telling her felt like lying, curled his toes in his shoes.

Mansell shoved his phone back into his pocket. She would be asleep now, anyway, or trying to sleep, staring empty-eyed at the ceiling, and besides, he couldn’t go to her with evidence he wouldn’t take to the skipper. He settled for glaring at the Waitrose as if this was all its doing. One of the pigeons huddled over the letters of the sign shuffled its feathers.

As he approached the automatic doors, he thought of watching Kent ask Chandler out in the incident room, when they had thought that they had finally solved a case properly. Nothing had come of it, of course, that damned phone call had ruined any chance of it, but he remembered it anyway. Remembered Chandler’s _I’d love to_. Mansell had been convinced, in that moment, that the boss had been smiling. Or almost smiling. Something of the expression about his face.

Now, he wasn’t so sure, and he wanted to find that certainty again. Wanted to believe, despite what he had told Buchan.

The strip lighting inside the shop was offensive to a man who had been awake for far longer than was reasonable. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone back to work after talking to Erica. Should have gone home. Tried to sleep. Or perhaps his eyes were just still stinging from the conversation he’d had with her.

Once she had cried herself out, she had straightened from his arms so abruptly that he had found himself cold with her absence. She had shaken her head fiercely, despite the dark streaks in her make-up, and set her face with a focus that he had seen shades of when she painted.

“He can’t be dead,” she had said, and it hadn’t been the bewildered meandering that Mansell had heard from most victims’ families. Instead, it was a statement. Declarative sentence.

He hadn’t known how to respond to it.

“I would have known, if he had died,” she had gone on, unwavering. “Show me a body that I can bury, and I’ll believe you. But until then, I can’t. I won’t.”

That was the point at which he had realised, with a strangling in his throat, that he was crying too.

It hadn’t been hope, he told himself, as he approached the tills, fishing around in his pocket for his warrant card, ready with his phone to find a photo of Chandler. She had had something like knowledge, and he needed to tell her that she was wrong, but was desperate for the world to tell him that he didn’t have to.

Maybe, whispered a part of him that he knew made no sense and shouldn’t be acknowledged, if he undid the part that said Chandler had killed Kent, he could undo the whole thing, go back to work tomorrow and find everyone in their proper places.

“Can I help you?” asked the lady at the till, a woman edging towards grey hair, a face covered in wrinkles from too many expressions, too much life. Mansell would count it as a success if, one day, Erica’s face looked like that. He would have hated it on Eva.

“DC Mansell,” he said, and showed her his warrant card. She looked at it politely, and nodded, but didn’t seem overly interested in it. Wasn’t the type to have had dealings with the police before, he supposed. He brought his phone up with the other hand, and her eyes turned to that with far more attentiveness. “I was wondering if you had seen this man in here last night?”

She leaned in a little further, and then a smile turned all the folds in her features inside out.

“Oh, yes,” she said, settling back into her chair. “I remember him. Lovely man. Came to the defence of a poor young lady whose baby wouldn’t stop crying – there was another man who was shouting at her, language that I don’t care to repeat. I’d hope that it’s the sort of thing my own son would do.”

“Right,” Mansell said, before she could go on. She seemed like the sort of person to go on. A distant roaring was beginning to start up in his ears, a buzzing in his fingers as they returned his warrant card to his pocket. “Thanks. Do you have some CCTV for us?” That would be timestamped, could prove an alibi, and get the DI out. Cleared. _And then where will we be?_

“Yes, I think so. Is it all right if I ask my boss to bring it to you in the morning?” the lady asked, fidgeting slightly, looking for a moment like a child asking for a homework extension. “It’s just, I don’t think she’d take so kindly to me doing it off my own back.”

“That’ll be fine,” Mansell assured her, already starting to navigate his way through his phone to Miles’ number, the screen warm against his thumb. “Just ask her to bring it to Whitechapel police station. It’s for DS Miles. About what time was he here, would you have said?”

“It was at about nine o’clock,” she said, leaning forward again. “I remember because I had a text from my son, to let me know that his plane had got in safely. He’s about your age, you know–”

“Thanks for your help,” Mansell said, and the dialling tone on the skipper’s phone was playing almost before he was out of the shop.

He picked up on the second ring, never one to let it go on for too long. Hated his ringtone and the vibration, Mansell had always assumed, but had never been able to find a more acceptable one. “Miles.”

“Skip, listen,” Mansell began, stepping out into the road. He didn’t get the chance to say anything more. Later, the witnesses would say that the car came out of nowhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and especially to those who leave comments or kudos (I hope the radio plays your favourite song when you're not expecting it). The next chapter should be up next weekend. But it's NaNo this month, so it may be late.


	6. Chapter 6

Chandler was beginning to hate the grey flecks in the walls of the interrogation room. Each and every one of them, personally. He hated the way the low-hanging light gave them a false gradient, shaded the ceiling into an impenetrable darkness, hated the reaching shapes of the damp patches, the festering of rising mould. He hated all of it, hated as if his mind were on fire, caught in a rage that he couldn’t and never wanted to swallow. But all he could do with it now was scorch at his surroundings, at the useless little box they’d put him in.

That was better, he told himself, than looking at Miles, and being within touching distance of remembering how it had felt to hate every plane of the man’s face. Or worse, finding sympathy trying to temper the pressure behind his sternum, because Miles looked almost as bad as Chandler felt. Not through any particular arrangement of his features or neglect of his appearance; he was as uncompromising as he had been before. But he was _worn_. Chandler supposed that the hours they’d both suffered, sloping by until the world swam ceaselessly, would do that to even the most resolute of people.

Miles would pretend that he didn’t feel it. Pretend that Chandler hadn’t noticed that he did. Chandler would pretend, too, because there was nothing else that he could do, or because then it couldn’t strike his anger down, not if he decided that he didn’t know the man sitting opposite him. Even though he did. He knew that before the hour grew too late, Judy would call Miles home, and he knew that he would pretend to sleep once he got there. He’d smile at his kids, and eventually that would start to feel real again. Eventually, he’d grow scar tissue. Now, though, now he was as raw as Chandler.

Better not to look, than to see all that. See that, and lose the first real power that he’d felt since his arrest.

Miles made it difficult, though. Made sure every evidence bag that he dropped onto the table clattered against Chandler’s tired brain, paused after each one so that he could properly feel the impact. By the time that he stopped, there was enough clear plastic on the table that Chandler couldn’t make out the contents of any of the bags, and the pressure in his head was almost painful.

“We carried out a more thorough search of your home,” Miles said. He stared straight at Chandler, and Chandler stared at the evidence bags, trying to recognise what had once been his possessions, and they were both looking at things they had never seen before. “There are a few more things with blood on them. Llewellyn says it’s like you walked through your apartment while you were dripping. There was plastic sheeting in the back of your car. Blood, again. Hairs we think are probably his. Llewellyn’s testing them, but she says they won’t have any DNA in them unless they were pulled out. I’m not sure we really need the results though. What do you think?”

_It sounds rather compelling, doesn’t it?_

Chandler knew the voice. Inside his head, it cut through a mind that was nothing more than cobwebs against it. Usually, it sounded like him. It still did, in a way. They were his own thoughts, after all. But now, there was something else there, too, the tones of an old woman in a bookshop. All dressed in red, and seeding it in the rest of his team.

_Maybe you did kill him_ , it said. _After all, your sergeant wouldn’t have brought you here unless you were guilty, would he?_

“The evidence is wrong,” Chandler said, aloud, somehow managing to keep his voice slow and steady. The anger, perhaps, giving him strength. It felt like most of his skeleton was stiff with it, like without it he’d be nothing but drifting autumn leaves. “I didn’t do it, I know I didn’t do it.”

_Nice young man in a sweetshop knew he didn’t do it, too, didn’t he?_

“The thing about evidence,” Miles growled, “is that it tends to not be wrong. That’s why we call it evidence.”

“Then you’re interpreting it wrong,” Chandler retorted. The words, their repetition, ached in his throat. “It wasn’t me, Miles.”

_There aren’t really many other ways to interpret it._

“You’re saying you were framed, then?” Miles said, and behind his scathing demand, Chandler thought that he could hear the slightest flash of doubt. As if the sergeant hadn’t dared to consider the possibility, and now that he had voiced it, he had realised there was no way back to it being unsaid and unheard.

It was gone again a moment later. Gone so completely that Chandler wondered if he had imagined it in the first place.

Miles’ hand closed around one last thing in his pocket, fingers digging creases into the material.

“Policemen don’t get framed outside of a screen,” he said. “And Riley found this.” He almost tore the last evidence bag from his suit, and slammed it down onto the table with enough force that Chandler could feel the table vibrating in his wrists. “Hidden behind your wardrobe.”

Chandler looked at the bag for less than half a second. It was like someone had injected winter into his bloodstream. The rage that had been holding him up vanished, drifting out into the world in the steam of his breath, come to nothing. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe.

Later, he might wonder if, perhaps, at some point, he had started to believe again that none of it was real. That he would wake up, go into work, and Kent would text him to say that he was stopping for coffee and did Chandler want anything? And then, despite the queues and the traffic, he would still arrive before Mansell, who would be just on the acceptable side of late and demanding to know why his drink was cold.

The thing in the evidence bag was _real_ , and it told him that none of that was ever going to happen again. It was a slim black wallet, cracked along its spine.

Kent’s warrant card.

Chandler stared at it, stared through it, couldn’t look at it and couldn’t look away from it. Distantly, Miles was still saying something. He thought. He couldn’t really hear it. His breathing was too loud, his throat dry with it. His hands buzzed with faraway pins and needles, almost numb, not sharp enough for real pain. His mother would have told him to turn them in circles, but motion was something for other people.

He knew that he was rasping. Couldn’t help it. His lungs felt like sandpaper. Wouldn’t inflate properly. Not enough to hold any air at all. Useless. And all his thoughts could do was stand on a ledge between silence and wailing, remain inarticulate.

It wasn’t the same as the blood. He had seen Kent bleed before, had seen his hands covered in it. But blood looked the same no matter who it had come from. It wasn’t the same as the tiles, in a house he had never been to, never seen. It wasn’t the same as hearing the caution from Miles’ mouth, hearing Kent’s name.

Kent’s warrant card was one of the things that had defined him, and here it was, without him.

Chandler’s head roared, and he couldn’t make it quiet.

_Maybe you did kill him_ , said the voice, and this time he could see it. He knocked at a door, and Kent opened it, confused for a moment because Chandler belonged in a different world from the kitchen floor with the white tiles, but he invited him in anyway, offered to make him a cup of tea, unsure of how else to deal with the crossover. Chandler accepted, Kent went foraging for an acceptable mug, and the knife in Chandler’s hand was long and sharp and dull in the light when he raised it. Then there was red, and the yellow of his tie coiling around the fingers of Kent’s hand.

He was lost, until the moment that the phone rang. He flinched back into his own body at the noise, staring stupidly at anything to try and shake off the look he’d imagined in Kent’s eyes. Reached for an elastic band that wasn’t there anymore. Miles swore, apparently cut off mid-tirade, and grabbed at it, stabbing a finger across the screen to answer it.

“Miles,” he said, shortly, and then waited.

Chandler thought that he heard Mansell’s voice, tinny on the other end of the line, and then there was something else. A crash, distant, like someone behind the two-way mirror popping a bag of crisps.

Miles clearly heard it more loudly, jerking the phone far enough away from his ear that he could glare at it, and then replaced it. A problem with the line, perhaps.

“I’m listening,” he snapped, but there was no muttered reply from the other end. He waited, and Chandler could feel the seconds crawling on his skin. “Mansell? Mansell!”

Nothing. Miles swore again, and stood up, the phone now held so tightly against his ear that it would leave a red imprint on his face as deep as if he’d slept on it. “Mansell!”

The sergeant cast a single glance back towards Chandler, then seemed to dismiss him, grabbing at the door and striding out. Chandler had the sudden urge to stop the tape recorder, but when he looked over to it, he noticed that Miles had never set it going. That would be something which he would need to talk to him about, instead of talking to him about other things, if he was still in a position to say anything once this was all over.

He started to reach out a tentative hand anyway, glancing upwards as though fearing some sort of terrible divine retribution. His eyes lingered on the two-way mirror, but he doubted that there was anyone behind it. It was late, after all. Anyone who’d been interested would’ve been in with him and Miles. The others probably wanted nothing more to do with him.

His decision made, Chandler’s fingers darted the rest of the way across the table and snatched at Kent’s warrant card.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed reading! Thanks so much for doing so, and especially for anyone leaving comments or kudos. Next chapter should be up next weekend, but again, might be late, as dissertation, NaNo, and me generally slipping further backwards into a Legends of Tomorrow pit.


	7. Chapter 7

The call from the hospital hadn’t been entirely unexpected. Miles didn’t welcome it, not by any stretch of the imagination, but once he had hung up on the silence at Mansell’s end of the line he had known it was coming, on some level. After all, there were only so many things that could cause a cut off like that. Mansell’s mobile was probably broken. Miles had imagined the cracks, thick lines in the display, and tried not to think about what else might be in the scene.

He’d tried to ring back anyway. No answer, so he’d kept trying. He would have been caught in that cycle of calling and waiting and hanging up, over and over until the battery ran out and the screen gave in, but the phone started to vibrate in his hand. Dimly recognising the number as one from the hospital, and wishing that he didn’t, he answered more quickly than he had known his fingers could move.

“Miles,” he said, and his voice echoed back at him through the handset. It sounded odd. Too light, or perhaps that was just the swaying in his head. Maybe he needed another coffee.

“I’m calling about DC Finlay Mansell,” replied the voice at the other end. Female, but too far away for Miles to tell whether he recognised it. He blanked out the rest of the sentence, nothing but her name and where she was calling from. He already knew the latter. “Are you his boss?”

“Yes,” Miles said. He didn’t quite know how to articulate the fact that the person who was actually in charge of Mansell was under arrest for the murder of the DC’s partner, couldn’t consider it all properly even inside his own head. But it wasn’t relevant, he told himself. This particular problem wasn’t one to be halved by sharing. “Is he all right?”

“He’s alive,” the woman replied, hesitating, as if she thought that that wasn’t a massively reasonable question to be asking about someone who was in hospital. Maybe it wasn’t, but she’d given the answer to the question that he hadn’t quite been able to ask. “But you’re going to need to come down, and contact his family.”

After that, there was nothing to do but leave the uniforms to take Chandler back to the cells, and meet Riley at the door. He told her everything he knew on the way to the car, and then there was nothing to say on the drive over, the unknown quantities swelling like leeches.

Miles felt ill, and he pretended that that was because of the journey, even though he’d never been travel-sick a day in his life. It didn’t really work. He knew that it was all the whys that he hadn’t been letting himself think about, coiling from his gut up into his throat. Protestations and bewilderment that couldn’t change the facts.

The nausea wasn’t the worst of it, though, and neither was knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sleep – that next time his head hit the pillow, all he would want to do was go and sit with his fish. It wasn’t even the way that Judy would look at him, with no idea what to say even after all these years, the way she’d hush the kids around him.

It was the cracks. The way it felt, like the ground suddenly shook when he walked on it, swerving and sloping, as unreliable as desert sands. Fractures, in his heart, across his ribs, in the vulnerable places that he didn’t let anyone see.

He was the only one left, too. From the team, at the start, when all the madness had begun with the Ripper. Sanders, saying his goodbyes so soon before the Kray case had started that Miles sometimes wondered if he’d had some sort of premonition. Fitzgerald and his betrayal, McCormack and his. Both gone now. Kent. Chandler. No way back for either of them. And yes, Riley was family, Mansell was family, Buchan had become some sort of weird uncle, but he still felt, in his own way, like a stone statue sitting in a chair at the edge of the incident room, watching as other people came and went. They left sand in their wake, and it ground at him.

He didn’t think that he could stand to have anyone else pass him. He couldn’t retire – it simply wasn’t an option, had never felt like one. It was possible that they’d try to force him out, especially if the rest of the team broke apart – he was too old for the powers that be – but they would have one hell of a fight on their hands. Maybe he would just crumple away to dust, still at his desk. Retiring was something for another reality, some kind of alternate universe. But then, maybe it was more likely than he thought; he would never understand on what plane of existence Joseph Chandler would have murdered Emerson Kent, would have scoffed like Buchan at a conspiracy theory if anyone had ever told him, yet that was the way that the evidence had fallen. There was no choice but to believe it, and the more he believed it, the angrier he grew. The angrier he grew, the more he dreaded _later_ , when the case would be closed and he would sit alone in the dead hours, when he would no longer have his fury to hold him up.

“We’re here,” Riley told him, as quietly as if they were in church. They weren’t, not yet, just sitting in a dark car park, and he’d been still for far too long after he’d turned the engine off.

He hated the hospital. Hated the smell and the lights and the colours. Hated even more that he knew his way around it, that the receptionist knew both him and exactly why he was there. She gave him directions without his needing to ask, and offered him a sympathetic smile that he did his best to return.

At least this time he wasn’t meeting Llewellyn at a crime scene, he told himself, as he and Riley hurried through identical corridors lit by identical humming bulbs. He hadn’t lost two DCs in as many days. Not if Mansell recovered. And if he didn’t, Miles was going to have something to say about it.

They had to sit down outside a room for half an hour, and Miles could have sworn that he counted every second twice. Riley must have been doing something similar, because the moment that a couple of nurses pushed through the doors, she was on her feet and showing her warrant card like she’d had her hand on it the whole time.

“DC Riley,” she said, as he followed her example, holding out his ID more slowly and probably with far more aching. “This is DS Miles. We’re investigating what happened to Finlay Mansell.”

The nurses exchanged a glance, and one of them gave an awkward smile and whisked off in the other direction. The other stepped closer to Miles and Riley, starting to wring her hands with the unconscious guilt that a lot of people seemed to get when assisting the police.

“I can help,” she said, and Miles did his best to ignore the way her inflection pushed it towards a question.

“What happened?” he asked, too impatient for anything else. “Is he going to be all right?”

“He’s going to need to be on crutches for a while, but he will recover full mobility,” the nurse said, then hesitated, managed a smile. “Yes, he’ll be fine. From what we can tell, he was hit by a reckless driver outside a Waitrose, but they didn’t stick around.”

“I can try and find some witnesses tomorrow, skip,” Riley offered, and Miles gave her a short nod, taking a moment to try to control the rushing of relief in his chest. Hopefully they’d be able to find some CCTV, too. Mansell at a Waitrose was something that he would need to see even if the witnesses _were_ reliable.

“Wait, you’re the skipper?” the nurse demanded, rounding on Miles, her nervousness at being in their presence abruptly vanishing.

“Yes,” Miles said warily, as Riley dug her notebook from her pocket, like she was planning to take notes, only to find that she didn’t have a pen. Kent had always written things down, he recalled, and suddenly it was as if none of the others knew how. “Why?”

“DC Mansell had a very urgent message for you,” the nurse said, leaning even closer, as if she was thrilled to have suddenly found her part in the great drama that the public tended to imagine was their job. “It didn’t make sense to any of us, but he was very insistent that we should tell you the moment you got here.”

“What was it?” Riley prompted, swiping a pen from a half-finished crossword that had been left forlorn on the hallway’s table.

“Just, _it wasn’t him_. Do you know what that means?”

They did. There was nothing else that it _could_ mean. Miles stared at her, waiting for the words to properly sink in, or for his mind to refuse them. Tried to stop them going deep enough to do damage, but they did, of course, they did, and then he couldn’t think. And then he was only vaguely aware of the rest of the world, of Riley, continuing to speak to the nurse, getting the specifics of Mansell’s condition, of himself, phoning the station to start the process of Chandler’s release. Maybe he should have waited, waited for evidence, but Mansell’s message was enough for him. An insistence of innocence from the person who had had to break the news to Kent’s twin was worth more to him than any CCTV.

They would need to start again. Make up ground on the investigation, after they’d been staring down a blind alley for so long.

It would be a relief, he told himself, to rip Chandler’s photo off the whiteboard, but all he could think was that he would still be able to see it. Would still be able to see the moment in interrogation when Chandler had refused the Tiger Balm (even though Miles had been able to see how much he needed it). He hadn’t considered the implications of it, not then, but he could see it now. The defeat. The feeling that everything had already fallen apart. The pain of the betrayal. All of what he himself had felt, believing Chandler guilty, no longer his and turned back on him like a weapon.

And he had no idea what he was going to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and especially for leaving comments or kudos (may puppies wag their tails at you). I'm hoping to get the next chapter up next weekend, but it's likely that it'll be late, as I'm travelling again.


	8. Chapter 8

It took him a long time to find the silence again, after he’d been returned to his cell. It was a pair of uniforms locking him in this time, not Miles. Miles hadn’t come back. He’d asked one of the constables why, where the sergeant had gone, and the man had flushed. Muttered something about a hospital, talking more to the floor than he was to Chandler. Then his partner had swatted his arm, and he hadn’t said anything else.

Chandler half-wished that he hadn’t heard even that much. His brain stretched the seconds to breaking point, filling them with flashes of nightmare. In the moments that it took for them to close the door, he saw the remainder of his team dead in more ways than he could count. Blood and bone and lime green hospital walls and rain dripping off black umbrellas. Over it all, his thoughts demanding to know why, considering the fact that Kent was dead and he’d been framed, it hadn’t occurred to him that _maybe, perhaps, the rest of the team might be in danger too_?

He could have warned them, should have warned them, even if they wouldn’t have listened to him, he should have done _something_ , because it didn’t _matter_ how they looked at him, he couldn’t _lose_ any more of them.

Chandler leant his head back against the wall and tried to will the nausea from his throat. Breathed, isolated the thoughts in his head, one by one, and forced them down into quiet. Eventually, no new ones came, and he was just his own exhausted self, alone with the weight of Kent’s warrant card, still hidden in his sleeve and safe in its evidence bag.

That was how he stayed, the minutes trickling by, gaining momentum, rushing into hours. When the voices started in the hallway, he barely heard them. Didn’t realise that they were for him, until the door opened and he didn’t flinch at the light.

He stayed still as they approached, his spine ramrod-straight and eyes resolutely forward.

“You’re free to go, sir,” one of them said. It was the same uniform from before, who had mentioned the hospital. He looked a little familiar. Probably someone whose name Chandler knew, at other times. Someone he nodded to at crime scenes.

It hurt, that this constable had seemed to feel more guilt about his arrest than the rest of his team put together.

“Go where?” Chandler asked, turning his head to talk to the man properly. The movement felt slow, aching.

The constable hesitated, his gaze dropping.

“Home, I suppose,” he said, finally, and then he stood away, waiting for Chandler to get up on his own.

He didn’t go home. Didn’t want to. Knew that, when he got there, he would find only the mess that Mansell and the uniforms had left. Didn’t want to see it. Instead, he took a change of clothes from his desk drawers, went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, washed his hands, then washed them again, and again, leant on the sides of the sink and stared at himself in the mirror, looked away and tried not to think about Lady Macbeth as he buttoned his sleeves.

There was a pot of Tiger Balm left on his desk. It wasn’t in its usual spot, and he did his best not to wonder if it was the one that Miles had had in interrogation, as he rubbed some into his temples.

Inevitably, he ended up standing and staring at the whiteboard, trying to let the world go on without him.

The notes from their previous case had been set aside. Perhaps, Chandler thought, another team would be taking it over. That, or someone would take Kent’s case off them. But the idea of that curdled his stomach. Maybe Anderson would take a call from him to prevent it. His godfather had been distant since the end of the Brooks case, had grown more so after every one of Chandler’s failures. Not out of any particular coldness, he didn’t think, just some kind of self-preservation. He’d probably have to go round there, talk to him in person.

But that wasn’t necessary yet, Chandler told himself. There was nothing on the board about the case being reassigned, and the only handwriting on it was Miles’. There was no evidence that anyone else had been brought in to help out. Probably, no one else wanted anything to do with it. He knew that the word _curse_ was bandied about in more stations than just his own.

Chandler picked a photo of the crime scene from Mansell’s desk, squinted at it in the dull light. It wasn’t one of the ones that he’d been shown before. Those had all been close-ups, visceral. This one was a wider view of the room where the murder had taken place. The others were right; there were no signs of a struggle, aside from the blood. Kent’s kitchen was otherwise mostly tidy. One of the cupboard doors had been left open, rows of mugs just visible inside. There were post-it notes on the fridge, cacti on the windowsill, and a half-full bottle of washing-up liquid next to the sink.

He carefully put the photo back where it had come from, and did his best not to look at it anymore. He couldn’t, not until he could look at it and see something useful about Kent’s death, instead of just trying to understand his life. Wondering about the house he had never been to, pretending that he couldn’t see the blood. Even though the report about it was right there next to the photo, a block of text looking at where it had fallen and where it hadn’t and trying its best to explain what had happened. As if any of them could ever know.

When he looked away from it, his eyes caught his own photo on the whiteboard. Kent’s, under the word _victim_ , watching him with wide eyes. And he could feel the empty desk at his back, the negative space waiting there like a monolith.

Behind him, the door to the incident room opened, and then closed again. There was someone else in the room now, all careful breathing and hesitant footsteps. Chandler knew who it was, knew the walking patterns of his team well enough to identify them by that alone. He didn’t turn, even when they stopped, still a few metres away. It would be best, he thought, to let them approach on their own.

“I–” Buchan began quietly, and then stopped. Couldn’t find the right words, perhaps. “I’m sorry. For your loss. For–” there was a sound like shifting knitwear, and Chandler could picture him gesturing, vaguely, at the whiteboard, at everything in general, “for what’s happened.”

Chandler looked around at him, made a vague sound in response that he hoped conveyed his feelings, whatever those were. He didn’t know how else to reply to that sentence, hadn’t been able to work it out even in the years since his father had died. It was better when it was something that he said to other people.

Buchan took that as an invitation, and moved to stand beside him, glancing at the whiteboard, then away from it.

“Someone should really take that down,” he said, but made no move to do so himself. Maybe he didn’t think that he could. Chandler knew that _he_ couldn’t. “DC Mansell followed up on your alibi. We all know you didn’t do it now.”

_You should have always known that_ , Chandler didn’t say. He wanted to save those battles, for a time after they’d caught the person who killed Kent, after they’d laid him to rest, a time when he wasn’t so _tired_.

“What happened?” he asked, instead. “I heard something about a hospital?”

“He was hit by a car,” Buchan said, fussed at one of his sleeves as if he’d just realised that he’d implied that he had believed Chandler was guilty. “Apparently he’s got a broken leg, a concussion, and looks like a piece of modern art, but he’ll be all right.”

Chandler nodded. They had been lucky, then. For Mansell, there would be painkillers and crutches and, eventually, teasing from Riley and Miles about being sure to look both ways. All of them were going to need to be more careful.

“And you?” Buchan was asking, hesitating again, as though he wasn’t sure if he had the right to ask. “Are you all right?”

Chandler wasn’t ready to tell him no. Wasn’t ready to tell anyone. Hated knowing it himself. Instead he gestured uselessly at the whiteboard, wished that that could somehow convey the futility of it all.

“I just can’t think of why anyone would–” he ran out of words that he could use, because none of the ones he’d been using in his head seemed like they’d express it properly aloud. “Do that.”

Buchan shook his head, as if he understood the situation about as well as Chandler did. Both of them lost, but unable to be it anything but separately.

“I’ve been searching for precedents in the Archive,” he said. “I thought that I might find them... easier to work with. Would you like to join me?”

Chandler went, because it was better than staying alone in the incident room, Kent’s desk waiting at his back like a rising headache. But he was lost in the Archive. Didn’t understand the filing system, or the shelf layout, and especially not the cardboard cut-out. Buchan didn’t seem to be understanding it, either. He just sat at his desk as if he didn’t even know what he was supposed to be looking for, and Chandler was at a loss as to how to help. He didn’t know how Buchan found his precedents normally, much less how to start searching in a situation like this.

“I’m sorry that you had to find out the way you did, too,” Buchan said, finally, and Chandler blinked at him, not understanding for far too long. “It was... difficult. For all of us. And... and, you were fond of him, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Chandler said. “I was.” Kent had been so easy to smile at, sometimes. Soft smiles, that didn’t cost anything. He’d been all earnest loyalty and trust, and where had it got him? “He asked me for a drink after the Abrahamians case. I always meant to…” His voice trailed away, hopeless. He didn’t know what he’d meant to do. Let him down gently? See where things went? He should have sorted it, should have done something, and now the weight of it would stay with him. Would find him, at night, in the still hours when there wasn’t anything else.

“You shouldn’t blame them,” Buchan said, suddenly, and Chandler flinched away from his thoughts, stared at him. “DS Miles and the team, I mean.”

Buchan’s gazed flickered over to Chandler, as if trying to gauge his reaction, but Chandler said nothing.

“You told me once that what you do is follow the bloody footprints and arrest the one holding the knife,” the historian reminded him. “And that’s all they did. All _we_ did.”

“They didn’t have to believe it the way they did,” Chandler said, glancing down at his hands. He’d expected them to be fists. They weren’t. “ _Miles_ didn’t have to believe it.”

“And he wouldn’t have,” Buchan said, and he could feel the man’s wide eyes on him, earnest, promising. “If it had been anyone other than one of us.”

Chandler made a despondent noise, and Buchan quieted again. Stilled.

“DC Kent wouldn’t have believed it, though,” he said thoughtfully, and his voice was catching with something almost akin to excitement. “He was loyal to you to a fault.”

_To a fault_. Chandler winced, and busied himself with a pot of Tiger Balm, trying to feel something other than his own memories. Something other than _fine, I’ll take Kent_.

“So far,” Buchan said. “We’ve been thinking about Kent’s murder as if it was about _him_. But considering what’s happened to DC Mansell, the planted evidence, it seems that it might not have been like that at all. What if it was more about framing you?”

It was one interpretation. A good one, probably. And it was one that finally gave Chandler a reason for the feeling that, even if he hadn’t been the one with the knife, Kent’s death was still his fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is later than intended - everything was getting away from me a bit. But I've handed in my dissertation now, so things should be getting easier to keep on top of. The next chapter should be up next weekend. In the meantime, thank you all so much for reading, and for those of you leaving comments and kudos - warms a writer's heart to have such lovely readers!


	9. Chapter 9

Riley was no stranger to exhaustion. She knew it like an old friend, knew the swooping quality that the world took on, the sudden rushes in her eyesight, and the particular dry sort of nausea. She’d had children. There had always been the sleepless hours after putting them to bed, spent watching the minutes ticking past and waiting for them to wake up again. The mornings after, sitting at the kitchen table, staring so blankly that it was as though her ability to blink had been stolen.

This was different. This was gritting her teeth so hard that she felt like they’d fall out if she unclenched her jaw. Clinging with her fingernails to wakefulness, even though she knew that she wouldn’t have been able to sleep even if she had been at home.

This was Kent gone, and Mansell lying in a hospital bed in front of her, so badly bruised that her kids wouldn’t have been able to recognise him. Miles had made light of it, on the phone to Buchan. The relief at hearing that Mansell would be fine seemed to have blinded him to the fact that Mansell wasn’t fine now, and he’d gone back to the station not long after. Following up with the uniforms who’d responded to the calls about the incident.

Riley had stayed. She didn’t know whether Mansell was likely to wake up any time soon, but she wanted to be there when he did. And she didn’t want to disturb her family by clattering about downstairs in the middle of the night. Her husband had work in the morning, and her kids had school. Needed their sleep.

She hadn’t told them. Her kids. Not yet. They didn’t know that they weren’t going to see Kent again. That, in however many years it took, they were unlikely to remember his face. They’d forget him like they had their gran, on their father’s side. They knew she’d existed, once, and they might have been able to pick her out of a line up, but they couldn’t have described her to a sketch artist. She wasn’t sure that Kent had made even that much of an impression on them. He’d always seemed uncertain around them, hadn’t quite known how to interact. Hadn’t really been that much more than a kid himself, when it had come down to it. Still lived with his housemates. Got carded, sometimes. Couldn’t handle as much alcohol as he seemed to think he could.

Her children had kept asking her what was wrong. They worried, even when her husband had told them not to. They knew what it looked like when someone had been crying. Even though she hadn’t allowed herself much more than that, after the initial shock. She didn’t think that any of them had. Maybe that was the _real_ reason why she hadn’t gone home, part of her suggested. She didn’t want to think about it properly.

On the other hand, Mansell may very well need her protection, or what little she could offer, in her state. He hadn’t been wearing anything even vaguely resembling high-visibility clothing, but Riley didn’t believe for a second that what had happened to him was an accident. Most likely, whoever had framed Chandler had been trying to keep their subterfuge from falling apart for just a little longer. That, or the entire team was under attack. Either way, she didn’t want to assume that Mansell was out of danger.

Her phone buzzed, and Riley welcomed the distraction from noticing shapes in Mansell’s bruises, an odd cousin of cloud gazing that made her gut clench. It was the skipper, but he’d texted, rather than called, which meant that he didn’t want a reply. The crash had been deliberate, he said, and the car used had been reported stolen.

Riley sighed. That seemed to take most of the effort that she had left. A headache was starting to brew somewhere at the back of her skull, and her eyes stung. In that moment, she might have turned over her job, both their cases, everything, to someone else, and just gone and found somewhere to lie down for the next several years.

_Things will look better in the morning_ , she promised herself, even though it probably already was the morning, and she could almost taste that it wasn’t true.

Out on the periphery of her awareness, there was the slightest of knocks on the door. Riley started, jerked her head around, and then half-wished that she hadn’t.

In her own way, Erica Kent looked as bad as Mansell did. Her eyes were red, face all wrong. Like she’d only had a vague idea of what a normal expression was, and had tried to copy it, one quirk of features at a time, only to come up with something which worked as its constituent parts, but as a whole looked like a child had slapped Play-Doh over a skull. She had probably only bothered so that no one would stop her and ask her what was wrong and if they could help.

“Hello,” she said, stepping the rest of the way into the room. For an instant, in the odd light, she looked so much like her brother that Riley’s attempt to plaster a smile onto her own face froze. Erica turned her head away, as if she knew exactly what Riley had seen. “DS Miles called me. How is he?”

“He’ll be on crutches for a while, but he’ll make a full recovery,” Riley reported, and, as she leaned backwards into her chair, she thought she saw Erica’s shoulders slump. “How are you?”

“Awful.” Erica took the seat opposite Riley, on the other side of Mansell’s bed, and avoided her eyes. The Erica she’d met before, first laughing with Mansell outside the station and then teasing Kent at some party she’d come along to, had never looked away from the person she was talking to. “But thanks for asking. Has... has there been much progress on the case?”

Riley watched her for a long moment, trying to work out how much Mansell had already told her, how much she was supposed to.

“We’ve released DI Chandler,” she said, and there was a flicker of something, somewhere behind Erica’s constructed expression.

“Did he do it?” she asked. The question was careful, the tone almost but not quite flat.

Riley shook her head.

“Not according to Mansell,” she said. “The nurses said he was very insistent about it.”

Erica nodded, slow and considered.

“Good,” she said, and her voice drifted as if she were somewhere else. “He wouldn’t have wanted it to be him.”

_Better if it hadn’t been anyone_ , Riley thought. Better if they’d still been investigating the other case, delivering the news to families that she had never met. Being able to go home in the evenings and sleep.

“Have you told the rest of the family?” she asked. Waited for Erica to realise what she was actually asking, and shoot her a sharp glare. Nothing came.

“I told Mum,” Erica said. “And she’s been letting everyone else know. But we still don’t want to have a funeral without a body.”

Riley did her best not to notice the use of the indefinite article, tried not to wonder if Erica had actually admitted to herself that her brother was dead. Mansell hadn’t said anything about how she was taking it, but it looked as if she were in the strange halfway place between acceptance and denial.

“What if we never find one?” she prodded. Regretted it for a moment. Just a moment. For all the good that it had done any of them, they’d been Kent’s family too, in their own way. They had at least some right to want to be able to say goodbye to him properly.

“We’ll see,” Erica said. “We’ll all have a talk about it, eventually. But Finlay says you’ll find him. You are doing everything you can, aren’t you?”

“Of course we are,” Riley said, and hated the way that her voice sniped towards a snap. Erica didn’t seem to notice.

“Finlay says you’ll find him,” she repeated, almost to herself this time, and her attention was almost completely on Mansell now, trying to hold him to a promise that he’d had no business making. None of them could really make promises like that. All they could do was offer everything that they could, and sometimes that wasn’t enough.

“Thank you,” Erica said, suddenly, and her eyes met Riley’s for the first time that night. “For,” she gestured vaguely, didn’t have the words that she was looking for. Riley didn’t have them either. She forced a smile, Erica forced one in return, and then they both looked away.

_Let it be enough_ , Riley thought, tried, in the way that was only truly possible after midnight, to send the idea out into the ether, as if that might make it more real. _Please, let it be enough_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and especially for anyone leaving comments or kudos (may you all receive cookies)! And, thanks for your congrats on my dissertation hand in. I am aiming to have the next chapter up next weekend, but that will be the weekend before my exams start, so it may very well be late.


	10. Chapter 10

The incident room was empty by the time that Miles got back. Quiet, the noises he couldn’t usually hear seeping up to the surface, the hum the lights made suddenly louder, pressing into his head. But he’d been alone there before, and this time, it felt different. Wilful. As though everyone who’d been walking towards their doors had abruptly turned and stridden away, rejected by some magnetic force. A repulsion, rather than an abandonment.

 _Everyone’s gone home_ , Miles half-thought, the rest of his brain buzzing in harmony with the bulbs, and then the exceptions popped into his head, one by one. Burst like bubbles on a thick July day. Mansell, still in hospital. Riley, guarding his bedside. Kent, never going anywhere ever again.

Miles’ mind shied away, left negative space that formed _the only one left_. His fingers tightened around his coffee mug, turned white. It seemed for a moment like the china would shatter, scratch and scald at his hands. But it held, the liquid inside pitching and roiling.

He tore Chandler’s photo off the whiteboard first. Barely resisted the urge to crumple it up and throw it into one of the bins the man was so keen on. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to frame Chandler, after all, so they might still need it. But at the very least, it didn’t belong under _Suspects_.

Without it, the board was near-empty. Miles stared at it until it blurred, and wondered about going home himself. They’d start again in the morning. It would do him good to have a break. Give Judy some peace of mind. He’d been letting the missed calls pile up on his phone. Any other case, and she’d have had words for him when he got in. As it was, she’d just watch him go out to see his fish, and that would be that. She’d leave him alone if, looking at his face, she saw that that was what he needed. She’d sit with him if it wasn’t. Sometimes – most of the time – she seemed to know better what he needed than he did.

She knew that he didn’t need a row, and she wouldn’t give him one. The question was whether Chandler would. Or, rather, _when_ Chandler would. He wasn’t going to let it lie that he had arrested him for murder, for _Kent’s_ murder, Miles could feel it in the air like the charge before a thunderstorm.

Hopefully they’d be able to think up some leads to placate him with, but they had precious little so far. All the evidence at the crime scene had pointed towards Chandler. Miles had a desk full of reports from the SOCOs to tell him that, and _he had done his job_ , not that Chandler would see that as an adequate defence, he’d be all concepts. Belief and trust and _hurt_.

Miles would ask the SOCOs to go over it again, but he knew the results would be no different. They had been thorough enough the first time. Had probably checked and cross-checked everything until they’d made it muscle memory. Until they’d found everything there was to find.

And that left them with the usual suspects. Family. Friends. Lovers. Though Kent didn’t have one of them, not that Miles had known about. He’d never brought one to the team’s various get-togethers, even when Mansell had been going through them like a puppy through cheap chew-toys.

They’d start up a list. Try and establish whether or not Kent knew any six-foot blond men in suits other than Chandler. If it had been a different case, he would have asked whether Chandler had an evil twin they didn’t know about. But on this one, the levity couldn’t find a purchase in his voice box. And it might bring about the inevitable row sooner rather than later.

There wasn’t, he noticed, lifting his mug to his lips with a savage smile, much chance of an escaped criminal, out for revenge. One whole pool of suspects who didn’t exist. He took a sip and grimaced. The coffee was cold. And awful. Probably always had been, but at least when it was hot enough to sear his taste buds it was impossible to tell.

Kent hadn’t been acting strangely, either. Hadn’t seemed upset coming into or going out of work, though Miles usually left a few minutes before him, so the boss would know better. Hadn’t been anything wrong with him that Miles could tell, no more than usual. If anything, Miles would have said he was a little way back to normal. He and Mansell had both been easing off on one another a bit since their last case, since Wales. It had seemed as if they were starting to get back into their usual completely acceptable (in Miles’ mind, anyway, no doubt Chandler would have called it unprofessional) cycle of teasing and glaring. Much better than scraps across the incident room.

Miles had thought that a lot of things were starting to get better. There hadn’t been sight nor sound of Louise Iver since their last murderers had lit up London, and Miles had started to hope, somewhat naïvely, he supposed, that she wasn’t coming back. The team seemed better. Kent was crying in the car park less, he thought, as difficult as it was to keep tabs on the frequency of something he wasn’t supposed to be aware of. Mansell had stopped wincing when his phone rang. Chandler had even been cracking a few of his weird and unsettling jokes, the ones that almost made Miles feel as though they had all just been replaced by exact doubles of themselves. He’d thought that the extent of their internal problems was that Riley and Buchan were still avoiding one another.

When their new case had arrived, their first since the Abrahamians, and Chandler had blu-tacked the first victim’s photo to the whiteboard, they had all gone at it like their heads were full of a near-fevered belief that this time, they could break their duck. All the same, Miles had planned an arrest where they had the whole team with them, as many other officers as he could wrangle, and then he would have sat guardian angel over their prisoner until it was over. It all would have been fine. Or as fine as things could be for a unit that seemed to deal exclusively with the cases no one else wanted.

All gone now, though, he thought. Took another sip of his coffee, even though he could feel his throat constricting in protest.

Behind him, the door opened, the noise of it so loud that Miles nearly dropped his mug. He turned, forcing down his mouthful of congealing coffee.

Buchan and Chandler were standing just inside, stopped by the sight of him, and Miles knew the expressions on their faces. He’d seen them on his kids when he’d caught them up at an hour a long way past their bedtime. Buchan took a tiny step backwards, and for a moment he looked as if he was about to tug Chandler back by the sleeve, out of immediate danger.

“Boss,” Miles said. As if using the honorific now could erase the way he’d felt himself trying to say it in interrogation and pushed it back until it had been something rotting at the back of his throat. And then he realised that he didn’t have anything else to say, hadn’t prepared anything. “You should go home,” he tried. Sounded the way four in the morning felt. “It’s late. We’ll make a fresh start in the morning.” It wouldn’t feel like a fresh start, though. It wouldn’t feel like one until they’d both found a way around his false start.

Chandler gave a short nod, but he didn’t move. At his side, Buchan’s attention had skittered off sideways, clearly feeling the tension.

“Night,” Miles told him, tried to gentle himself so that the historian would know that all he meant was that he didn’t have to be involved in a situation that he clearly didn’t want to be in. He wasn’t sure if he got it across, but Buchan mumbled something indistinct to Chandler, attempted a smile in Miles’ direction, and then started off back down towards the Archive.

Chandler stayed where he was, and Miles couldn’t quite make out any of what was on his face.

“I’ll drive you,” he found himself offering, as if helping the man out with a transport inconvenience could make up for arresting him.

Something crossed Chandler’s face, then. It took Miles a moment to identify it as doubt. It shouldn’t have, but it was like the man had replaced all his features, one by one, until his face was even less familiar than it had been when Miles had thought he was a murderer. But he still followed when Miles walked past him out of the incident room. Said nothing. Left Miles to count the steps towards the car in silence. Wishing he could, by sheer power of will, double the distance between him and the conversation that he needed to start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I am really sorry it's taken so long to update. I had exams and then a commitment to a swap for another fandom, and then I was on holiday, and then I had to get back into the fic. Hopefully, the gaps between updates should be getting more regular again, and thank you all for your patience! Thank you, as ever, for reading, and especially for those leaving comments or kudos (may the television show many documentaries in subjects that interest you)!


	11. Chapter 11

They were five minutes out of the station before Miles tried to speak, and even then, it was barely anything at all. Just a hesitation, only distinct from the rest of the quiet because Chandler had been waiting for it, because he’d felt every single second since Miles had offered to drive him, right down to its constituent parts. It took three more of them for him to finally find his voice.

“It’s going to be a mess,” he admitted, without looking at him. Chandler wasn’t sure why it had taken him so long to muster it. It wasn’t as if it was something powerful or heartfelt. Wasn’t going to break the ice. Would probably have difficulty putting a dent in a thin rime of frost. “Your apartment. Mansell and the uniforms were... in a hurry.”

Easier than saying that they had hated him, Chandler supposed. That they hadn’t cared. Easier, and less honest. But he was too tired to try and feel angry about that now. Too empty, as though under his skin, he was just a yawning cavity. He just wanted to go back to his home and sleep, but he knew that the moment his head hit the pillow, he would feel like he’d just had enough espresso to kill a god. He’d just lie there, too-open eyes staring through the ceiling and counting the seconds until morning.

He made a vague noise of what he hoped was understanding. Perhaps Miles was hoping that Chandler would stay home to tidy the place tomorrow, that it would be easier on him if he didn’t have to see him. He’d be wrong. The negative space would make it worse. Chandler knew that, just as he knew that the empty desk he wasn’t looking at would be sitting in the corner of his head, even if he didn’t go in to work. That he’d know it was there, waiting, and that that was enough to hurt. That he’d still see it, even if someone else did start to sit at it, eventually.

“Listen, for what it’s worth, boss, I’m sorry,” Miles said, voice barely audible over the noise of the car. “I’m sorry it had to go like that.”

Chandler could feel the answer to that, a snarling, deep in his chest, but his bones were too weary to force it upwards and out. _It didn’t have to go like that. It shouldn’t have gone like that. Kent died and you broke me and you can’t make that all right by saying it should have._

That wasn’t how it was going to work. Sooner or later, Chandler was going to tell him, tell him that the apology felt like a faint sifting of icing sugar in a gale, and always would have, no matter how heartfelt it was. But not tonight. They were too drained to scrap.

Maybe tomorrow would be different, Chandler thought, but he didn’t need to look at his watch to know that tomorrow was the same day as this one.

“I know you cared about him,” Miles said, and closed his mouth so hard that Chandler was surprised his teeth didn’t click together. Out of the corner of his eye, from where he stared resolutely at the road through the windscreen, he thought he saw him swallow twice before he forced himself to continue. “We all did. I hope that might help you understand why.”

That didn’t mean he could forgive it. Or that Miles should expect it of him. Not now, when he couldn’t sip enough water to get the ache out of the back of his throat.

“What did you and Buchan come up with in the Archive?” Miles tried, when Chandler still said nothing.

“Ed thinks that,” Chandler began, and had to pause, felt his voice thickening with a hesitation of his own. He couldn’t find the best way to word it, but he couldn’t let the silence back without an answer. “He thinks that it might have had more to do with framing me than murdering him.” And that sounded wrong, like he was suggesting that Kent hadn’t mattered, hadn’t been important, and that wasn’t what he'd meant, not how it should’ve sounded, should’ve been taken. There was a beat of nothing, and he wanted to rush in, keep talking, keep explaining, defend Buchan’s theory just like in the old days. But Miles was nodding, slowly.

“Makes sense,” he said. “You probably have more enemies than Kent.”

Chandler would’ve said that they probably had about the same amount. It was just that more of them knew his name than Kent’s, a result of everything from being the lead detective to having had his face plastered all over the newspapers when he had failed to arrest the Ripper. _I stopped him, though_ , Chandler remembered, and had to close his eyes for a moment, against the streetlamps past the window that streaked golden patterns through his darkness. _Kent said, I stopped him_.

“They would’ve had to plant the evidence in my apartment,” Chandler found himself saying, and his brain stuck on the warrant card that had found its way safely into one of his desk drawers, still in its plastic bag. It would stay there until the investigation was done, beyond that. The thought of handing it back in felt like a poorly-played violin.

“The SOCOs have already gone over it,” Miles said. “But we can check again with the neighbours, have Riley go through the building’s CCTV.”

Chandler nodded, and settled back into watching the window until Miles had pulled up outside his building, and then half of him didn’t want to get out. He would start looking for somewhere new, he decided. The apartment wouldn’t feel like his, not anymore. Not after Mansell and the uniforms and the SOCOs had gone tramping through it, trying to find evidence to support a lie, not after the person who had killed Kent had left his blood there. The idea of spending the night in that place suddenly made him feel sick to the core, and he wondered if he should pack a bag instead, go to a hotel. Or maybe he should go and sit with Mansell, let Riley get home to her family. Try to remember him as the person who’d been hurt trying to clear his name, and not the one standing at Miles’ shoulder the night they’d arrested him.

Either way, he would let Miles get away, back to Judy. She was probably worrying. Probably had been worrying since the whole thing had started.

Miles watched him as he opened the door and straightened awkwardly onto the pavement, stretching out uncomfortable limbs. He wanted something, Chandler knew, but it was nothing that he could give.

“I’ll be in tomorrow,” he said, instead, and Miles had to be content with that. With the assurance that he’d still work with him, that they would still work together. Chandler would do that, and he would keep doing that for as long as necessary. Until they caught Kent’s killer, nothing else would matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so, it's been a while, and I just wanted to reassure anyone still reading that a) this fic is not abandoned b) this fic will not be abandoned. As ever, hopefully it won't be that long again before the next update, because that was a long time. Thanks for reading, and especially for anyone leaving comments or kudos!


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